Other Random Posts

I am a still recovering from BookExpo and sorting through the hundreds of books and galleys I brought home. I didn't just grab stuff for myself, but a ton of teen fiction for my daughter and non-fiction books for my wife. So it was Christmas for them, too. My shoulders and back are aching from the bags of books I lugged around the convention floor before unloading them in my car (I must have made a dozen trips to my car over the weekend to unload galleys…thank god I parked near the entrance!). But it was worth it. I wonder how many of the books I'll ever get around to reading.

Not only did I scoop up galleys of new books from Dennis Lehane, Robert Crais, Thomas Perry, Anita Shreve,  and scores of other other "name" authors…I also got the JUNO screenplay, Roger Ebert's book about Scorcese, and the official episode guides for RESCUE ME, 24, and a few others TV shows. I didn't expect to find those among the freebies.

Aside from all the free stuff, I spent a lot of time chatting with librarians and booksellers, meeting new authors, and browsing through the offerings at the various publishers' booths. That was great.

I was surprised how many teams of book dealers were there, working the
autograph area, hustling between  lines (and often shouting across
them) to get signed galleys and books they could turn around and sell. I found it really irritating. I wish there was a way to
keep them out, though I realize they count technically as booksellers, too. That said,
most of the booksellers who were there sell *new* books, ordered from publishers
and paying royalties to authors, not the freebies they snag at
BookExpo. It's one thing for the dealers to dominate the signing lines
at events like the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books or Bouchercon,
but I felt an industry event was the wrong place for them to be
clogging up the lines. Maybe I'd feel differently if so many of them this year weren't so loud, pushy and rude.

I bumped into a lot of friends, including Marv Wolfman, Mark Evanier, Harry Hunsicker, Brett Battles, Penny Warner, T. Jefferson Parker, Bob Levinson, Patricia Smiley, Bill Fitzhugh, former Mystery Bookshop proprietor Sheldon MacArthur and agent Ken Sherman among others. Paul Levine was carrying around a galley called THE LANGUAGE OF SEX  (or something like that) under his arm and, while I was talking to him, a guy stopped to ask if Paul wrote it and where he could get a copy. Paul, of course, claimed he not only wrote it, but the JOY OF SEX as well. I surprised Victoria Rowell, one of the stars of DIAGNOSIS MURDER, who
was signing the paperback edition of her memoir and we had a warm
reunion. I ended my visit with a long dim sum lunch in Chinatown with my book agent Gina Maccoby. We talked about what I should do next now that I'm not juggling two books series and writing four books a year. I pitched her one of the mystery/thriller ideas I have and she loved it…so maybe I will try to start writing it in-between Monk books this year…or I may just write it as a spec script first and see what happens.

Speaking of specs, I better stop procrastinating here and finish the one I'm working on….

I am in heaven here. I have already made three trips back to my car to unload books and galleys…and this is on top of the bounty of books I brought home yesterday. On Friday, I mostly talked to authors, booksellers, sales reps and countless librairians….and gave away a bunch of MONK books at the MWA booth. Today the convention seems to be deluged with desperate, frantically clueless wannabes (how they got in, I do not know). Before the doors even opened, I was practically tackled by a woman who pitched me her book (something to do with elves, angels, past lives, the Clinton “murders” and iraq) even though I told her repeatedly that I wasn’ta publisher or a producer who options books. I was just an author. She wouldn’t let up…and then went from me to some other poor soul.
But this was far from an isolated incident … It has happened to me three times this morning already. A woman who wrote a christain spiritual dog training guide insisted there was a series in it and, when I told I wasn’t interested, she told me how a famous producer she went to high school with stole her idea for a TV series (she sent him a short story she wrote that had a dog in it and then he did a show with a dog in it). That same woman then held up an autograph line for 10 minutes telling her life story to the author of a non-fiction book about Blackwater…if he had a gun, he would have shot her. I saw this same thing happen in the line for a famous children’s author…a woman got up there and pitched the poor guy her idea for a book and inundated him with postcards, fliers and candy (allof which he threw away the moment she was gone). It’s cringe-inducing. Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

I am going to be at BookExpo at the Los Angeles Convention Center tomorrow and Saturday, signing and giving away copies of MR. MONK IN OUTER SPACE at the Mystery Writers of America booth alongside Max Allan Collins, who will be doing the same with his latest CRIMINAL MINDS novel.

I can't wait to go…the last time I was at BookExpo was twenty years ago in San Francisco, and I still remember how exciting it was get so many free galleys and books. Every major and minor publisher in America is there, promoting their new titles to booksellers. It's like Christmas for a book lover like me. I'm also looking forward to seeing my literary agent and other friends who are out from NY for the event. So there will be lots of schmoozing and trips back to the car to unload galleys…

Attending BookExpo will also be a welcome distraction from anxiously waiting to hear whether or not I've managed to snag a major studio screenwriting assignment that I have been vying for over the last few weeks…I am one of the final candidates now and I should know any minute if I got it. I am trying not to get my hopes up but, as experienced and cynical as I am, I can't seem to help doing it anyway. Maybe its because its a project that is *perfect* for me and that I would have a great time writing. If I get the gig, it's a big assignment that I will have to write very, very fast…so I might be absent from here for a few weeks.

In the mean time, I am hard at work on MR. MONK AND THE DIRTY COP (book #8) and a new spec, which is based on a book I optioned earlier this year.

And I've just learned that Oscar winner Gene Hackman and CSI creator/showrunner Anthony Zuiker will be among the speakers joining me, Bob Levinson, Jesse Kellerman, Heather Graham, Stuart Kaminsky, Rupert Holmes and Mary Higgins Clark at the International Mystery Writers Festival in Owensboro Kentucky, where my play MAPES FOR HIRE will be performed June 12-22.

It looks like, no matter what, June is going to be a very busy, exciting and fun month for me!

I should have waited for the DVD…the best way to watch this plodding movie is with a fast-forward button. Don't wait in lines to see it this weekend, see IRON MAN again instead. It's a lot more fun.

The New York Times reports that as the city becomes a safer, cleaner place to live, it has become a lot less interesting for mystery novelists to write about.

As New York celebrates the sharp decline in crime — earlier this year
the city revealed that the 494 homicides in 2007 were the fewest since
reliable police statistics became available in 1963 — the crime writer
may be the only New Yorker for whom that drop is not an unequivocal
blessing. Just as the breakup of the Soviet Union caused problems for
writers whose plots hinged on the dark doings of the cold war, so New
York’s crime writers are wondering where to find grist in a far safer
city.

IAMTW Grandmaster Donald Bain is wistful for the NY of yesteryear for other reasons.

In January, Mr. Bain was the main speaker at a meeting of the Mystery Writers of America, held at the National Arts Club, opposite Gramercy Park.

At
dinner in the club’s high-ceilinged dining room, Mr. Bain, a tall man
with a white beard, reminisced about the early ’90s, when his daughter
lived on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. Her apartment building
was next to a social club run by Vincent Gigante,
a k a the Chin, the mobster whose associates used to sit outside the
club, playing cards and drinking late into the night. If one of the men
saw his daughter emerging from the subway station a few blocks away,
Mr. Gigante dispatched one of them to walk her home safely.

The
other writers at the table laughed, but their laughs were tinged with
nostalgia for a vanished version of New York that could hand you a
scene, just like that.

Winning an Edgar last month had a big impact on acclaimed "literary" writer Susan Straight, who writes about the experience, and the power of mystery writing, in a page two essay in today's Los Angeles Times Book Review. She's writes, in part:

In 1996, while in a Berkeley bookstore signing my novel "The Gettin
Place," which links the Tulsa Riot of 1921 and the L.A. Riots of 1992,
I met a sociology professor who told me only mystery writers truly
delineate and fully imagine America's often overlooked landscapes. He
taught a class using only mysteries, and told me mine would be joining
the syllabus.

It was one of the most gratifying things anyone has ever said
to me, and I felt that way during the Edgars, when I watched the
convivial, joking mystery writers pay tribute to one another and
realized how many of their books I've loved. The propulsive plots, the
dialogue, the intricate detail of murders and clues and geography. What
Edgar Allan Poe did — frighten us while fascinating us, digging deep
at the part inside us that we recognize even in those awful characters
— is what mystery writers still do.

[…]Now I look at Edgar's
downcast, black-brushed eyes and hope to write something dark and noir
again, something to take readers into places and souls where they might
never otherwise dare to venture. *

This spoof is so dead-on…it could actually be a Fox series.